17/07/2026
[ISAFIS Gazette #12 The “Perpetual” Cycle: Gendered Violence in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo]
R**e is no stranger to war. On the contrary, it has become a constant and violent participant in warfare. This decades-long persistence suggests that wartime r**e is rarely a single committed act. Instead, it acts as a method, wielded by armed groups to assert control over individuals and, by extension, the communities they belong to. In the Congo and Sudan, sexual violence has been used to assert such control at such frequencies that are capable of drawing international headlines on their own, separate from the general violence of war.
Survival, in these contexts, does not often translate into an end to all effects of violence. It continues with the destruction of access to reproductive healthcare for victims, rendering recovery impossible. Furthermore, in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, sexual abuse has been perpetrated by members of the very institutions mandated to interrupt this violence: UN Peacekeepers and alike. No institutional accountability is present to support abandoned mothers and children of the members of these institutions.
The identification of this cycle exists to emphasise that it is neither inevitable nor incurable, and that identifying the issue offers hope for a liberated tomorrow for the women of Sudan and Congo, so long as this identification is followed by institutional accountability.
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